Cellular networks are very volatile and diverse. Due to the nature of the wireless channel, link conditions change at a fine timescale. Metrics such as latency, jitter, throughput, and losses are hard to bound or predict. The diversity comes from the various network technologies, plethora of devices, platforms, and operating systems in use.
Techniques that rely on compression or right-sizing content do not address the fundamental issues of network volatility and diversity as they impact the transport of data. Irrespective of the savings in compression, the data still weathers the vagaries of the network, operating environment, and end device.
Mobile applications as well as web applications are powered by cloud data: images, video, audio, messaging, and so forth. The ability to quickly exchange—download or upload—assets with the cloud is a key factor in the user experience. While various parameters may affect network latency, there are no “golden values” that can be a “one size fits all” approach. As a result, mobile application developers lack methods and techniques to optimize operational dimensions that affect mobile performance.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section. Similarly, issues identified with respect to one or more approaches should not assume to have been recognized in any prior art on the basis of this section, unless otherwise indicated.